Language Production In Children Research Articles

Differential Effects of Unilateral Lesions on Language Production in Children and Adults

We present the first direct comparison of language production in brain-injured children and adults, using age-corrected z scores for multiple lexical and grammatical measures. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited in a structured biographical interview from 38 children (5–8 years of age), 24 with congenital left-hemisphere damage (LHD) and 14 with congenital right-hemisphere damage (RHD), compared with 38 age- and gender-matched controls, 21 adults with unilateral injuries (14 LHD and 7 RHD), and 12 adult controls. Adults with LHD showed severe and contrasting profiles of impairment across all measures (including classic differences between fluent and nonfluent aphasia). Adults with RHD (and three nonaphasic adults with LHD) showed fluent but disinhibited and sometimes empty speech. None of these qualitative or quantitative deviations were observed in children with unilateral brain injury, who were in the normal range for their age on all measures. There were no significant differences between children with LHD and RHD on any measure. When LHD children were compared directly with LHD adults using age-corrected z scores, the children scored far better than their adult counterparts on structural measures. These results provide the first systematic confirmation of differential free-speech outcomes in children and adults and offer strong evidence for neural and behavioral plasticity following early brain damage.

Why ask questions? Contextual effects on grammatical structure in the language production of children with specific language impairment

In this small-scale study we investigated the influence of different aspects of context on the language production of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Each of the variables, type of partner, the partner’s interactional style and the type of material used for eliciting conversation, was related to the probability of the use of a set of grammatical constructions by the child. The results show that the interactional style of the conversational partner as well as the type of elicitation material used can have an influence on the grammatical complexity in the language production of children with SLI. Further investigation of such contextual effects from a dialogical perspective would have important implications for intervention with these children.

Why ask questions? Contextual effects on grammatical structure in the language production of children with specific language impairment

Why ask questions? Contextual effects on grammatical structure in the language production of children with specific language impairment

Local and global characteristics in the development of morphosyntax by French children

Statistical analysis of morphosyntax acquisition in French children aged two to four can be conducted at two levels. At the local level, regularities in the immediate lexical context of a word are evaluated by computing the proportion of pairs of consecutive words (e.g., such as) produced by children which are also produced in the same order by adults. At the global level, regularities in collected samples of children's language production are evaluated by computing the correlation between child distribution and adult distribution of open-class lexical categories in language production samples. Data from child language production show that irregularities evolve at the global level and tend to disappear over time. In contrast, local regularities already present at the age of two remain stable during maturation. To account for these findings, it is suggested that: (a) local regularities are a consequence of the reproduction of the adult's morphosyntax, and global irregularities a consequence of the randomness of a child's cognition and understanding of the world; and (b) high-level syntax - as opposed to morphosyntax - appears only later, as a development of local-level rules, and global regularities are a consequence of high-level syntax.

Contextual influence on the language production of children with speech/language impairment.

To investigate the possible contextual variability of language and interaction, data from 10 children with speech/language impairment and three different types of conversational partners (a parent, a peer and a clinician) were collected. The dialogues were analyzed with respect to the characteristics of the dialogues as whole, to the dominance and the productivity of the three types of conversational partners, and to the productivity, fluency and grammatical structure of the language production of the children with speech/language impairment. Productivity was measured as mean length of utterance (MLU) in words, number of utterances, number of different words and proportion of complete and intelligible utterances. Fluency was measured as the proportion of utterances containing a maze. Grammatical structure was analysed with respect to the use of grammatical morphemes, word order patterns, the occurrence of expansions and the complexity of verb forms. Significant differences, in particular between child-child and adult-child dialogues were found. The adult-child dialogues were asymmetrical, where the adults dominated through asking many questions and talking much. The peer dialogues were more dynamic and equal. In these dialogues the children with speech/language impairment took a more active role as a conversational partner. The children produced more utterances and different words with the adult partners, but variables related to fluency and grammatical structure did not vary as a function of the conversational partner. The results imply that children with speech/language impairment practise different aspects of their communicative ability with different types of conversational partners. In particular, it is important to provide them with opportunities to interact with peers, in order for them to develop their skills as independent conversational partners.

Recovery of written language production in children with traumatic brain injury: outcomes at one year

The purpose of this study is to determine if the pattern of deficits in written language production persists at one year after resolution post traumatic amnesia. Seventy-one children, aged 8 to 15 years, with mild, moderate and severe closed head injury were compared with controls who were individually matched on the premorbid characteristics of age, gender, school grade, behaviour and academic performance. For children with severe injury, deficits in written language persist at 1 year. Although the extent of the deficits lessens somewhat, the pattern of deficit at 1 month and 1 year are similar.

Early lexical, morphological and syntactic development in French: Some complex relations

This paper presents fine-grained longitudinal analyses of one child's language production over the period of change from single to multiword utterances. For a better understanding of the developmental processes underlying this change, detailed distinctions in transitional phenomena were made and related to changes in other aspects of language: the quantity and composition of the vocabulary and the use the child makes of it, and the beginnings of grammatical knowledge. Results suggest the existence of two possible paths leading to the change from single to multiword speech. The conversational path, based on discoursegenerated Successive Single-Word Utterances where the child, functioning as a “regular” Single-word speaker, is led to produce a sequence of related words by replying to the adult, and the more general speaker's path, based on developments in the expression of recurrent communicative intentions/events. For this child, the two paths co-occur and seem complementary, both feeding into the change to come. Although prefixed additional elements appear along with the first multiword utterances, it is only when combinatorial speech is well-established that they become syntactically- motivatedfillers, word categories begin to show formal differences, and some verbs present incipient bound verbal morphology. This development may in turn produce changes in combinatorial speech. The developmental relations between the aspects of language studied here seem consistent with a spiral model of development, typically constructivist model in which a step taken in one domain promotes the taking of a new step in another, which may in turn promote further development in the former.

Origins of autobiographical memory.

This study tested the predictions of M. L. Howe and M. L. Courage's (1993, 1997) theory of infantile amnesia compared with a social-interac tionist account of autobiographi cal memory development (R. Fivush & E. Reese, 1992; K. Nelson, 1993b). Fifty-eight mother-child dyads were assessed for maternal styles of talking about the past and for children's self-recognition, language production, and nonverbal memory when the children were 19 months old. Children's shared and independent memory reports were then assessed from 19 to 32 months. Maternal reminiscing style and self-recognition uniquely predicted children's shared memory reports across time, even with children's initial language and nonverbal memory factored out. Self-recognition skills also predicted children's later independent memory. These results support a pluralistic account of the origins of autobiographi cal memory.

Origins of autobiographical memory.

This study tested the predictions of M. L. Howe and M. L. Courage's (1993, 1997) theory of infantile amnesia compared with a social-interactionist account of autobiographical memory development (R. Fivush & E. Reese, 1992; K. Nelson, 1993b). Fifty-eight mother-child dyads were assessed for maternal styles of talking about the past and for children's self-recognition, language production, and nonverbal memory when the children were 19 months old. Children's shared and independent memory reports were then assessed from 19 to 32 months. Maternal reminiscing style and self-recognition uniquely predicted children's shared memory reports across time, even with children's initial language and nonverbal memory factored out. Self-recognition skills also predicted children's later independent memory. These results support a pluralistic account of the origins of autobiographical memory.

Quelques considérations sur l'étayage dans une situation d'évaluation particulière: le jeu symbolique

During our work for the diploma in speech therapy, we concentrated on the problem of assessing children's language abilities in discursive-interactive perspective (language analysis in interaction). Within this framework, we chose the pretend play situation in order to assess certain linguistic and pragmatic capacities in a child with developmental language disorders (dld) an in a child without, each interacting with a speech and language therapist, and then with his/her mother. Our results have shown relevant elements about adults scaffolding in child's language. Firstly, the child with dld requires an important amount of adult scaffolding at the various levels of analysis (the verbal participation, the interaction plannification, the use of communicative functions). Secondly, different interlocutors implie different scaffoldings and influence notably on the child's language. This shows, in our opinion, the necessity to consider the impact that our own language has on a child's language production and to integrate it into an evaluative perspective.

Homonymy in the lexicons of young children acquiring American Sign Language.

The incidence of homonymy in children's early sign language production was examined in nine young children of deaf parents. Analysis of parental reports of how their children formed their signs revealed that all of the children produced homonymous forms (i.e., a single manual form used to represent two or more different adult target signs). Altogether, the children were reported as producing 26 sets of homonymous forms to represent 59 adult target signs. This incidence of homonymy in the children's early signing did not differ significantly from the incidence of homonymy previously reported in a study of normally developing children acquiring spoken language. This finding is interpreted as indicating an important similarity in language acquisition processes across language modalities. Analysis of the sign formational characteristics of the children's homonymous forms revealed that the children's signs and the adult target signs typically shared a common location aspect. The movement and handshape aspects of the adult target signs were less frequently retained in the children's homonymous forms.

Written language production and neuropsychological function in children with traumatic brain injury

Objective: To establish the early consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on spontaneous written language production in children by examining writing deficits as a function of injury severity and correlating written performance with neuropsychological data. Design: Case-control cohort study. Setting: Two regional medical centers. Patients: Seventy-six children, aged 8 to 15 years, with mild, moderate, or severe closed head injury were compared with controls who were individually matched on the premorbid characteristics of age, gender, school grade, behavior, and academic performance. Main Outcome Measures: Assessment of written language production and neuropsychological function was undertaken approximately 1 month following resolution of posttraumatic amnesia. Case-control differences on 16 measures of spontaneous written narratives were computed. Results: Factor analysis and conceptual similarities suggested that the measures of written language fell into five domains: Efficiency, Completeness, General Readability, Error, and Vocabulary. A highly significant, moderate correlation between these measures and severity of injury was found. The highest correlations were found for the written language domains of Efficiency and Completeness and the lowest for the Vocabulary domain. Moderate correlations were also found between measures of written language and neuropsychological function. Conclusions: At 1 month after resolution of posttraumatic amnesia, written language production in children with TBI is negatively correlated with severity of injury. Some aspects of written language production are affected to a greater extent than others. Considerable common ground was found between written language production and neuropsychological function.

Conversations with Vovo: A Case Study of Child Second Language Acquisition and Loss

This paper examines a series of naturally-occurring phone calls between a young child and his grandmother in the child's second language. During these calls, the child's second language production first appears to increase in complexity, but is subsequently abandoned. It is argued that while the acquisition of the second language can be viewed as a product of expert-novice interaction, the subsequent abandonment of the second language can be understood only by examining its role in the larger socio-cultural activity in which the L2 is used.

Grammatical Morpheme Acquisition

No AccessJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing ResearchLanguage1 Oct 1994Grammatical Morpheme AcquisitionDo Norms Exist? Margaret Lahey, andEmerson College, 100 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02116 Margaret Lahey Emerson College, 100 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02116 Google Scholar More articles by this author andEmerson College, 100 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02116 https://doi.org/10.1044/jshr.3705.1192 SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In References Bloom, L., Lifter, K., & Hafitz, J. (1980). Semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflection in child language.Language, 56, 386–412. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar de Villlers, J., & de Villiers, P. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech.Journal of Psycholinguists Research, 3, 267–278. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Lahey, M., Liebergott, J., Chesnick, M., Menyuk, P., & Adams, J. (1992). Variability in children’s use of grammatical morphemes.Applied Psycholinguistics, 13, 373–398. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Miller, J. (1981). Assessing language production in children: Experimental procedures. Austin, TX: PRO-ED. Google Scholar Paul, R., & Alforde, S. (1993). Grammatical morpheme acquisition in 4-year-olds with normal, impaired, and late-developing language.Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 1271–1275. ASHAWireGoogle Scholar Additional Resources FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byLanguage, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools44:1 (20-31)1 Jan 2013Differentiating Children With and Without Language Impairment Based on GrammaticalitySarita L. Eisenberg and Ling-Yu Guo Journal of Communication Disorders43:3 (175-198)1 May 2010Morphophonological salience as a compensatory means for deficits in the acquisition of past tense in SLIMaria Mastropavlou First Language25:3 (365-376)1 Oct 2005A comparative study between mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm) and mean length of utterance in words (MLUw)Matthew D. Parker and Kent Brorson Perspectives on School-Based Issues5:4 (16-20)1 Dec 2004Evidence-Based Practices: Empirical EvidenceJohn R. Muma and Steven J. CloudJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research45:5 (961-969)1 Oct 2002Grammatical Morpheme Production in 4-Year-Old ChildrenDenise V. Balason and Christine A. Dollaghan Child Language Teaching and Therapy15:3 (247-259)1 Oct 1999Elicitation in verb morphologyLindsay Klimacka and Karen Brunger Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research39:6 (1239-1257)1 Dec 1996Toward Tense as a Clinical Marker of Specific Language Impairment in English-Speaking ChildrenMabel L. Rice and Kenneth Wexler Volume 37Issue 5October 1994Pages: 1192-1194 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library HistoryReceived: Jan 25, 1994Accepted: May 3, 1994 Published in issue: Oct 1, 1994 Metrics Topicsasha-topicsCopyright & PermissionsCopyright © 1994 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationPDF downloadLoading ...

Prediction of School Outcomes Based on Early Language Production and Socioeconomic Factors

Early differences in family SES, child language production, and IQ were related to outcomes in early elementary school in the present prospective, 10-year longitudinal study. In a prior study of family interactional variables associated with language learning, major differences in parenting (i.e., time, attention, and talking) were found to be associated with differences in child productive vocabulary between 7 to 36 months of age, and child IQ, favoring higher-SES parents. Lower-SES children were exposed less often than higher-SES children to diverse vocabulary through their parents' attention and talking, and they were prohibited from talking more often. In the current study, 32 children involved in the earlier study were repeatedly assessed between 5 to 10 years of age, while in kindergarten through third grade. Results indicated that SES-related differences in child language prior to school were predictive of subsequent verbal ability, receptive and spoken language, and academic achievement assessed on standardized tests in kindergarten through grade 3. However, none of the predictor variables were related to direct measures of elementary schooling. When combined with a composite SES indicator, early child language production significantly increased the variance accounted for in the prediction of elementary language and academic competencies in each subsequent year in elementary school. Implications are discussed in terms of the stability of performance on language and academic performance measures of children who entered school with different early language learning experiences, and the need to consider early home- and school-based intervention designed to prevent or ameliorate these trends.

Child maltreatment, attachment, and the self system: Emergence of an internal state lexicon in toddlers at high social risk

AbstractThe ability to talk about the internal states (ISs) and feelings of self and other is an age-appropriate development of late toddlerhood hypothesized to reflect toddlers' emergent self–other understanding and to be fundamental to the regulation of social interaction. This study examined the effects of child maltreatment on the emergence of low-socioeconomic status 30-month-old toddlers' IS lexicons. Children's lexicons were derived both from maternal interviews and from observations of children's spontaneous IS utterances in four laboratory contexts. Results from both data sources indicated that maltreated toddlers produced significantly fewer IS words, fewer IS word types, and proportionately fewer IS words denoting physiological states and negative affect than nonmaltreated toddlers. In addition, maltreated toddlers were more context bound in IS language use and more restricted in their attributions of internal states to self and other. Gender differences were also observed. Individual differences in children's IS language production were significantly related to general linguistic maturity in both groups but to toddlers' conversational skills only in the comparison group. In addition, a cumulative risk model describing the effects of the child's attachment relationship with the caregiver on early IS language was tested. Toddlers most severely at risk (maltreated/insecure) had the most compromised IS language. Thus, secure attachment may serve as a protective mechanism against self-dysfunction in maltreated toddlers.

The effects of two levels of linguistic constraint on echolalia and generative language production in children with autism

The effects of specific types of adult antecedent utterances (high vs. low constraint) on the verbal behaviors produced by three subjects with autism were examined. Adult utterance types were differentiated in terms of the amount of control the adults exhibited in their verbal interactions with the subjects during a free play setting. Videotaped interactions were analyzed and coded according to a predetermined categorical system. The results of this investigation suggest that the level of linguistic constraint exerted on the child interactants during naturalistic play sessions affected their communicative output. The overall findings suggest that (a) adult high constraint utterances elicited more verbal utterances in general, as well as a majority of the subjects' echolalia; (b) adult low constraint utterances elicited more subject high constraint utterances; and (c) the degree of constraint of adult utterances did not appear to influence the mean lengths of subjects' utterances. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for educational interventions, and suggestions are made for future research concerning the dynamics of echolalia in interactive contexts.

A comparison of language production skills of preschoolers with special needs in segregated and integrated settings

Although the popular and general professional literature concerning the integration of preschoolers with special needs into community‐based settings is supportive of such efforts, remarkably little information is available regarding the use and production of language by these young children in integrated versus segregated settings. The opportunity for an exploratory study of the language production of children attending, on a partial week basis, both a segregated centre and integrated community centres became available at a Canadian program in Victoria, B.C. Through the cooperative efforts of a program‐based speech and language pathologist and a university‐based child care researcher, a small n [5 children], observationally based study was undertaken. The children were videotaped in both settings during a free play period as well as during an adult‐directed activity. The results, with each child serving as his or her own control, indicated that three of the children were mo verbally productive in the segregated setting during free play periods, und in the integrated community settings for the teacher directed [structured] activity. One child was more productive overall in the specialised segregated setting, and one was more productive overall in the integrated community setting. Concluding remarks underscore the need for continuing research efforts in this area of inquiry.

Speech errors in early child language production

There has been very little attention paid to nonsystemic errors in child language that closely resemble the speech errors made by adults. I have collected 576 such errors in the course of doing diary studies on my two children. Analyses reveal strong similarities with adult errors, suggesting that the language production system is set up in an adult-like fashion from a very early age. However, a number of differences suggest interesting ways in which the child's language production system differs from that of adults: a lower rate of decay for the activation of elements that have been accessed and less interdependence between different phonological elements in a word or segment. The data are useful for settling some of the controversies about adult language production that are based on error phenomena and support some of the predictions made by recent connectionist models.

Generalization of treatment effects by young language-delayed children: a longitudinal analysis.

This study investigated the generalized effects of a language intervention program on the structural aspects of 8 language-delayed preschool children's productive language. Subjects were observed in preschool free play for periods ranging from 12 to 24 months concurrent with receiving daily didactic language intervention. A total of 57 two-, three-, and four-word syntactic forms were taught to criterion. Generalized usage was determined from (verbatim) language samples collected during free play periods in the subjects' classroom. Forty-two (74%) of the treated forms generalized to the subjects' spontaneous language in free play. There was a relationship between the complexity and potential functions of the treated forms and their generalization to free play. This effect may have been related to the subjects' MLUs. Substantial changes also occurred in the subjects' MLUs, frequency of speaking, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test scores, and Houston Test for Language Development scores over the period of instruction. These measures suggested that 4 of the 8 subjects were functioning near the normal range at the conclusion of treatment. Implications of these and other results are discussed.